


The Art Of Keeping Up Disappearances.

by southspinner



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:51:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1427461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He’s not mad at you.” Levi’s not quite sure if that’s a lie or not, doesn’t have the space in his head or heart to mull it over as his fingers brush the wooden hilt tucked against his hip. “Hey, calm down. No one likes a crybaby. Just…”</p><p>And oh God, he can’t do this, can’t do this with a lump rising in his throat and sickness roiling in his guts like the waves below, can’t do this but has to just like every other goddamn tragedy he’s had to endure in this sick, fucked-up excuse for a world. “Just look at the ocean, Armin.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art Of Keeping Up Disappearances.

**Author's Note:**

> If it's not obvious, I got the whole concept for this from a scene in Season 4, Episode 14 of The Walking Dead. ("Just look at the flowers, Lizzie." Yeah? Yeah?) At any rate, it was something I wrote because adorable blondes losing their sanity never fails to break my heart, and because I needed some pointless angst in my life. Enjoy.

People deal with tragedy in different ways.

Levi knows this from his own life if not from years of watching the lives of others flit before his eyes, snatched away far before their time and leaving broken remnants in their wake, witnesses to their passing that react along a kaleidoscope spectrum of emotion. Some cry. Some scream out their rage at the observant sky until their lungs give out. Some (and by some, Levi means himself) retreat into themselves and push the pain down so far that even they can’t touch it. And some…

Some lose the last fragile grip they have on their sanity.

This thing with Armin starts slow, so slow that it’s almost hard to recognize. Little inconsistencies, a hint of derangement in his laughs, the angle of his smiles not quite right. Most of the others don’t pick up on it, too caught up in their own grief of the trail of dead bodies leading back to the walls they left behind so long ago, a mission they started for the glory of humanity but no one really knows what it’s really for anymore. Eren and Mikasa worry because they know him. Levi doesn’t have the heart to tell them that Armin’s already beyond their reach. It always starts like this, the slow descent that people don’t acknowledge until it’s too late. It’s just a waiting game now.

“You know, all the Titans were humans once,” Armin says one night, staring uncomfortably intently into the fire. “Maybe that’s what happens when you die beyond the walls. You come back as one.”

“Quit talking bullshit, Arlert,” Levi snaps gruffly, almost feeling the weight of Eren and Mikasa’s worried looks hanging in the air. “You’re creeping everyone out. Christ.”

Armin keeps quiet after that, but that doesn’t make the situation better. He wanders off from the group, spends the nights wandering aimlessly around camp, the days with his eyes unfocused and a dreamy half-grin painting his lips. Eren tries to talk to him. Eren tries to talk to him again. Mikasa sits all night at the entrance to his tent and refuses to sleep, her eyes fatigue-sunken onyx chips staring at Levi in a silent, worried question as the hours tick by and the fire burns low. She hates him and he’s not fond of her, but after the first time she falls off her horse, dizzy from lack of sleep, he starts letting her ride double with him, murmuring unintelligible things against his shoulder in fitful dreams as they keep moving.

“Maybe everyone we lost on the way here is still out there somewhere,” Armin says another night, nails ragged and bloody where he’s been picking at them unconsciously. “Maybe… maybe all those deaths weren’t meaningless. Maybe Titans are just the next phase of life.”

“Get some sleep, Armin,” Levi mutters softly, getting up and placing a hand between the blonde’s shoulderblades. There’s no use being rough with him at this point. It’ll only speed up the inevitable. He’s never been very good at kindness, but some kind of warped sympathy makes him sit beside Armin’s bedroll into the wee hours of the morning, listening to the little snatches of whispered, insane prose that spirals off the younger boy’s lips.

But in all of Levi’s experience in tragedy, he’s never seen anything like what comes next.

Usually, people on Armin’s particular downward spiral end up ending it themselves, unable to cope with the weight of their own madness as it swells up over them. Levi’s been expecting that result for weeks, to look in Armin’s tent one morning and see him cold and still, wrists slashed open, to find him hanging from one of the trees around their campsite. He’s been preparing Eren and Mikasa for that eventuality, making sure he’s up before them every morning in case he has to clean up a grisly scene before they have to see it, talking to them in thinly-veiled warnings and implications that have passed from rude to truthful. He’s seen too many fragile souls eat a bullet when the going gets tough to expect anything else.

What he doesn’t expect is for Eren and himself to go out for water and stumble upon Armin, his torso soaked in sticky red, looming over Mikasa’s unmoving body.

Eren lets out a sound like a wounded animal and tries to run to her, but Levi grabs him by the collar and hauls him back, all too aware of the knife in Armin’s hand. Mikasa is laying on top of an armload of firewood. He got her in the back. She never saw it coming. For all the roaring of the racing pulse hammering against his ribcage, Levi’s voice is surprisingly calm. “Armin, what did you do?”

“I had to show you,” he smiles brightly, looking like he’s just brought home a new puppy instead of a dead body. “I had to show you that she’d come back.”

Somewhere in the periphery of his consciousness, Eren has started wheezing, choking on something that sounds like sobs. Cautiously, Levi takes a step forward. “Armin--”

And just like that, there’s a knife two inches from his nose. “No! Just wait! You’ll see, I promise, we just have to wait!”

“Okay. Okay, we’ll wait.” Levi’s watched Sasha hunt before, recognizes his voice as the same one she uses when approaching wounded, dangerous prey. “But here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to tie Mikasa to this tree so that when she changes, she can’t hurt anyone. You should go back to camp with Eren and get a clean shirt. Don’t want to scare her, right?”

Armin looks skeptical for a second, and Eren looks downright horrified. But eventually, both of them come to separate realizations and leave together, Armin with a bounce in his step and Eren with hunched, heaving shoulders. Levi waits until they’re gone before he kneels next to the crumpled corpse, yet another soldier gone under his watch. She looks so much smaller in death.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he pulls a knife from his belt and carves a furrow from the nape of her neck, cold steel on cold flesh. Just in case.

An hour later, and Eren hasn’t stopped muffling broken sobs into the crook of Levi’s neck since he stepped foot back in camp. An hour later, and Levi hasn’t stopped at least trying to know what comfort is, awkward, stilted hands smoothing down the brunette’s rumpled hair as he breathes in shallow hiccups.

“We have to do something,” Levi eventually mutters, watching Armin wander aimlessly around the campsite, smiling serenely. “If he could do this to Mikasa, then no one’s --”

“I know! Don’t you think I know that?!” Eren chokes out, his hunger-hollowed face looking even more stark in all his distress. “But I can’t, God, I _can’t_ …”

People deal with tragedy in different ways.

“I’ll do it,” he finally whispers, carding a hand through his hair and exhaling heavily. “I would never ask you to, not to him. Just… Promise you won’t follow us, all right?”

Eren nods mutely and shuffles out of the tent like a ghost of himself, and after a minute of trying to force himself back into composure, Levi gets up and walks over to Armin with an amicable little wave. “Hey, Arlert. Want to see something?”

Still not quite there, Armin nods airily and follows him to the treeline, up the precarious face of a cliff and out to--

“Woah.”

“This is what we came out here looking for, remember?” The wind is cold and salty as it blows against his face, and Levi has to raise his voice for it to be heard, pointing out to the infinite horizon as waves crash on the shore a hundred feet below. “I always heard you telling Eren stories, but here it is, the real thing. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Armin’s eyes swim with tears, and a breathless smile stretches across his face for a moment before he falls to his knees, shoulders shaking with fragmented sobs. “Is Eren mad at me?”

“I… what?”

“The way he looked at me. He was m-mad at me, I could t-tell,” the blonde hiccups, fingers digging into the grass beneath him. “And you are too. I d-didn’t mean to point a knife at you, I j-just… I just wanted you to wait!”

“He’s not mad at you.” Levi’s not quite sure if that’s a lie or not, doesn’t have the space in his head or heart to mull it over as his fingers brush the wooden hilt tucked against his hip. “Hey, calm down. No one likes a crybaby. Just…”

And oh God, he can’t do this, can’t do this with a lump rising in his throat and sickness roiling in his guts like the waves below, can’t do this but _has to_ just like every other goddamn tragedy he’s had to endure in this sick, fucked-up excuse for a world. “Just look at the ocean, Armin.”

The sobs continue, and Levi feels like he’s being torn apart piece by piece. “Just look at the ocean, Armin. Look at the ocean.”

And eventually he does. Eventually he follows direction and stops crying, and in the instant before Levi steps up behind him and rakes the blade in a crimson arc across his throat, he could swear that he saw a smile.

They make it home two months later with one-third of the people they left with. There are many expeditions that follow in the years to come, battles won and lost and miles of new coastline discovered, but Levi never looks at the ocean again.


End file.
